A final farewell to a great writer of literature. Emmanuel Macron will pay a national tribute to the writer Maryse Condé, a voice of French-speaking literature from Guadeloupe, on April 15 at the National Library of France, the Elysée announced Friday evening.
The tribute will be held on the BNF site on rue Richelieu, said the presidency, confirming information from the Outremers360 site.
A “giant of letters”
Maryse Condé died on the night of Monday to Tuesday at the age of 90, in Apt (Vaucluse), after a life of humanist combat and exploration of West Indian and black identities. Born in Pointe-à-Pitre on February 11, 1934, she has written about thirty books, mainly fiction, about the history of Africa and its diaspora, the legacy of slavery and black identities.
Its great success in bookstores is Segou, a fresco in two volumes (1984 and 1985) on the decline of the Bambara empire, in Mali, from the 18th century until the arrival of the French colonizers. In 2018, she received the “new literature prize”, a short-lived replacement for the Nobel Prize created by the Swedish committee in the midst of the MeToo crisis.
“A literary giant, Maryse Condé knew how to paint sorrows and hopes, from Guadeloupe to Africa, from the Caribbean to Provence. In a language of struggle and splendor, unique, universal,” wrote the President of the Republic upon the announcement of his death.
From Africa to the United States before returning to France
The president of the departmental council of Guadeloupe, Guy Losbar, called for “a national tribute, commensurate with his immeasurable talent”.
Having lived in several African countries (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea and Senegal), Maryse Condé criticized the limits of the concept of “negritude” proposed by the Martinican Aimé Césaire and the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor.
From 1995 to 2005, she directed the Center for Francophone Studies at Columbia University in New York. She then became an intellectual figure in the United States, a country which she left permanently in 2013, to retire in a village in the Luberon, Gordes, in the south of France.